LONG DISTANCE

Feelings of disappointment, dislocation, and disconnection permeate novelist Savaş’ first story collection.

The distancing forces Savaş explores in her 13 stories include time, immigration, motherhood, and grief; all result in a need to reassess a relationship. In "Marseille," Amina, a new mother on a weekend getaway with childless college friends, sees a shift in priorities within the group as they are all forced to begin considering the passage of time. In "Long Distance," two newish lovers dance passive-aggressively around their differing expectations during a trip Leo takes to visit Lea, who's studying in Rome. Another exchange student, in Russia, can't connect with her needy, elderly host mother and can only appreciate the woman’s kindnesses in retrospect in "We Are Here." New parents, reeling from the effects of sleep deprivation, receive controversial advice about sleep-training their baby from one friend but feel an even greater sense of disorientation when the same friend treats the atrocities of an ongoing war as something one needs to “have a break from” in "Cry It Out." Upon hearing distressing news about a minor acquaintance, one of Savaş’ protagonists muses that the “lives of strangers appeared improbable only because they were seen from a distance.” This melancholic assemblage includes episodes of missed connections—on weekend trips, at family gatherings, or over text messages—as characters seek intimacy; or, as in the case of the narrator of "Notions of the Sacred," seek to excuse a breach in a tentative reconnection between friends. Alliances and affections shift, understandings waver, and beliefs are challenged in this collection of stories which individually and collectively convey the difficulties of maintaining connections in a fractured world.

Subtle but clearly drawn sketches of the ties that bind and that, inevitably, come undone.